We had our annual ice storm start today and that meant longer commute times for me and house-relegation for Jessica. For those of you not familiar with them (I know I wasn’t before I came here), the ice storm is simply misting rain in sub-freezing temperatures with the end-result being a nice sheet of ice on EVERYTHING.
By now I’m used to these, and I just know that it involves taking a little more time to get places. I did observe a couple new things:
1. It is possible to drive your car too slow on an ice-covered road. This one guy almost caused a five-car pileup because a unique situation required a bunch of people several cars behind him to “slam” on their brakes because of the slow line he generated.
2. When scraping ice off the car window, once you have some of the ice off at the bottom, it is best to flip the scraper over from the normal motion. The normal scraping works fine for thin layers or snow, but with thick layers it just jams the contact portion of the ice into the firmly planted portion behind it. With the inverted motion, it redirects a lot of your force outward from or perpendicular to the window. This is effective because the warming air on the inside of the car (you turned it on, right?) has created a thin layer of melted ice on the part touching the window, and it needs a prying motion more than a jamming one. Hope that makes sense.
The Splendiferous Zeppelin Escapades of the Jeppys 